


Hope for the Future

by phoenixyfriend



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Gen, Time Travel, Until it's time to drink something and then it all goes out the window, lab safety, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 10:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20946968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: There's a Jäger in a crater,There's a Jäger in the crowd,They say he's from the future,But his past's behind a shroud.





	Hope for the Future

**Author's Note:**

> Done for Girl Genius Event Week for "Oct. 7 - The fic that requires too much backstory and I just want to write the one cool scene"
> 
> I wrote all the backstory anyway

It’s Henye who finds him first.

To the casual observer, Henye is very obviously a Jäger. She is thick-limbed and lumbers when she walks, and her green eyes are faceted like a bug. Her fangs are as large as any of her brother’s, and her hair is as pale as a forget-me-not. Her skin alone is a human shade, as dusky as any desert-born woman, and she’s taken pains to decorate the exposed skin with tattoos of every monster and army she’s had the delight of fighting over the past century and a half.

It’s 1742.

She’s on her way home from a solo trip to a town in the mountains. She has a paramour there, forty and feisty and refusing to even consider the idea of a gender. Henye’s rather taken with them, even if her brothers take all the pains they can to tease her for being so smitten.

It’s dark.

She’s used to it, of course. She’s had _ages_ to get used to the angled view her eyes afford her. She’s used to the odd play of light and color that she’s learned to decipher over the decades. She can read with them, even, though it takes more focus than she’d like. She can see well _enough_, is the core of it. She knows every Jäger in the army, if only because she’s had to memorize them, face for face and smell for smell, piecing together who they are from the shards she can make out.

It’s loud, when he arrives.

Henye jumps in shock, the sound out of nowhere. She angles herself and speeds across the landscape, hopping from tree to stone and letting the wind whistle through her hair. She lands heavily at the edge of a crater and peers over the edge with curiosity.

What she sees is a Jäger.

What she sees is a stranger.

What she sees is, quite frankly, _impossible._

\--

The new Jäger is unconscious and strapped down by the Heterodyne, surrounded by the generals. Amund is in the back, behind the prisoner, with his arms crossed and his mouth set in a frown so severe that Countess Jessamine would have been proud.[1] He’s upset to have been called back from assignment in the Ottoman’s court, secret general or not.

Mikhail Heterodyne is sitting back and eating a donut, watching them. He’s content to let them take point for now.

This, dear readers, is the tableau to which our main character wakes up.

He opens one eye, sees the generals, and then opens them fully.

“So,” he says, eyes darting from one to the next. He pauses. He shakes his head.

“Never mind, I’m going back to sleep.”

Mikhail bursts into laughter, and Gkika can’t help a snicker.

“Hy dun theenk dot’s a goot idea,” Goomblast says.

“Don’t care,” the mystery Jäger says. He lays back.

“Set him on fire,” Mikhail suggests.

The Jäger sighs and raises his head, opening his eyes again. “What do you _want?”_

He doesn’t talk like a Jäger, unless Amund counts, or Jenka in her diplomat guise. He’s clever with his words, precise in a way that circumvents the teeth and, more tellingly, the Mechanicsburg accent.

“Hyu iz a Jäger,” Khrizhan grumbles. “Und none of us know hyu. So! Who iz hyu, who made hyu, und how deed dey figure eet out?”

The mystery Jäger groans and lets his head fall back against the table. “My names is Moloch. I’m… I…”

He stiffens up, sudden and shaking. His eyes dart around, breath coming faster and faster and _faster._

Mikhail perks up, leaning forward. “You’re…”

Moloch sucks in a deep breath, keeps his eyes on the wall, and carefully says, “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t… remember?”

“I _don’t,”_ he says, through gritted teeth. “I remember my name. I remember… nothing. I don’t remember people or faces, I don’t remember who made me the way I am, and I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t remember my own last name. I don’t know what’s going and I’m _very_ annoyed about it.”

His head falls back against the tilted table. “I need a _blasted_ drink.”

\--

Mikhail delights in figuring out whether or not Moloch is telling the truth. The Jäger has a snarky, snappish air to him, and while he’s a very good assistant in the lab, really a _minion,_ even, he’s also not quite ready to fawn over the Heterodyne as most of the Jägerkin do. Mikhail refrains from injuring him too much; he’s just too _useful_ and _funny_ to put out of commission. While he’s a Jäger and saves Mikhail from his own mistake faster than even Jovana once, he’s not willing to let Mikhail do whatever he wants. He’s not old enough to be a general, but he talks and walks like one, grumpy and avoiding unnecessary fights and entirely too tired of Mikhail’s bullshit to humor him when it’s going to cause more trouble than it solves.

“He’s more of a _minion_ than a _Jäger,”_ his darling Henrietta says once, draping herself over the back of his chair and trailing poison-tipped nails across the fabric of his shirt. She has fun this way, teasing her husband with the ease of her murderous tendencies. “Perhaps you should keep him in the labs, rather than send him out with the rest.”

“And keep him from his brothers?” Mikhail asks.

Henrietta shrugs. “There is Jovana and the rest of the honor guard. He will not be alone.”

“It seems cruel.”

“My dear, _I_ am cruel, and I know how much you love your little hunters; he will be fine. He is an antisocial sort, and there will be others.” She trails her teeth over his ear. “Leave it to the morning. Come to bed.”

It’s not the last of his thoughts on the matter. Henrietta isn’t even wrong, is the thing. The way Moloch speaks and acts is the trained and practice habits of very, very competent head minion. He organizes things and people with an exhausted air, like he knows how good he is at it and wishes he didn’t have to put those skills to use. He _cares,_ too, has all these pesky little morals and ethics and occasionally manages to convince another Jäger to not do something they were planning just because it’s ‘wrong.’

He’s _fascinating._ He’s _strange_ and _impossible_ and yet he’s still there and telling the truth.

Mikhail has no idea what’s going on, but once or twice he tries to do something and Moloch just snatches it out of his hands and says, “No.”

There is no pleading or delicacy, no “Oh, but Master, there’s a problem.” There is no action befitting the classic minion.

Moloch just snatches the vials out of his hands and says “no,” like Mikhail is a naughty child instead of the Lord Heterodyne.

“What?” Mikhail asks, willing to give it the few seconds it takes to get an answer.

“You want to blow your face off? Because this is how you blow your face off,” Moloch says, waving one of the vials in the air. He does it carefully enough to not spill anything, but it’s a close thing.

“How do you know?” Mikhail asked. “That was only discovered a few weeks ago. Nobody’s gotten around to mixing those _and_ published about it yet, I’m sure.”

_“Everyone_ knows you get an explosion if you… mix…” Moloch trails off and frowns down at one of the vials. “I mean… I…”

He raises his head and meets Mikhail’s eyes and suddenly looks very, very lost.

“I don’t know how I know that.”

“Okay,” Mikhail says. He tilts his head and squints a little at Moloch, mentally weighing him and decides, “My last Chief Minion died three months ago due to some rabbit hamster-crows. You get the position.”

Moloch stumbles back, a look of horror on his face. “No!”

“No?”

_“No,”_ Moloch stresses. “That’s—I don’t know why but I do know I don’t like the idea of that position.”

“It’s a very good one,” Mikhail cajoles. “And you’re already basically doing it.”

“I am _not,”_ Moloch insists. “I’m just keeping you from killing yourself.”

“That’s basically what a chief minion does.”

Moloch freezes up and Mikhail waits.

“Excuse me.”

Moloch leaves the room, only walking face-first into the door’s edge _once_ on the way out.

“…I like him,” Mikhail says.

**“So do I,”** the Castle laughs.

“Is he more polite than you’d expect?” Mikhail wonders. “Or is it just that he lost the ‘reverence’ and gained the ‘basic respect for social niceties’ in return?”

**“Send him on a blind date,”** the Castle suggests. **“Better yet, go on one yourself, since you and your lovely little maiden don’t seem to be ge—”**

_“Okay!_ That’s enough.”

\--

Moloch spends so much time in the Castle that some of the Jägerkin forgot he existed before he shows up, grim-faced and terse, to the Drinking of the Jägerdraught.

He stands back and stays quiet, eyes flicking around and refusing to answer the questions they quietly pose to him as the Generals finalize their preparations.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” he mutters. “Something is—something is _wrong.”_

The others keep an eye on him, of course, but there is a wariness to it, silent and judging, not just the care they’d have afforded any other sibling. They still don’t know who made him. They still don’t quite _trust._

He keeps vigil with the rest, blending in with the colorful crowd by virtue of electric blue hair and the grey tinge to his tanned skin. He is as silent, as caring, as hopeful as any other Jäger, but the unease flies off of him in waves.

Something is wrong, he said.

Something is wrong.

\--

A Jäger will never turn down a drink.

It’s something that is considered common knowledge. They’ll eat or drink almost anything. Glue, motor oil, peculiar bits of things stuck to the underside of someone’s elbow sleeve. It all goes down the hatch, even if some of them are at least a little too classy for the unknown.

They still have limits, though. Even they will shy away from drinking hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde, and undiluted nightshade. There is extreme omnivority, and then there is sheer stupidity.

And then, _then_, there’s Moloch.

The Heterodyne is off on a trip to Sturmhalten in an attempt to steal a few secrets, and most of the Jägerkin have been left behind. Moloch takes the chance to go down to the Jägerhall and sit among the rest.

“Hoy!” Oggie says, falling into the seat next to him. Maxim and Dimo aren’t too far behind, but even others are peering closer. Henye in particular has perched herself on Joaquim’s shoulders to peer down at them through her large, unblinking eyes. “How old iz hyu?”

He sets a large mug of something next to Moloch’s hand, and beams as Moloch takes it without second question.

“I don’t know,” Moloch says, and the Jägerkin around him lean forward in anticipation. It’s a little strange, to see a Jäger without a _hint_ of a Mechanicsburger accent, even among friends.

Dimo considers it a hint. “Hyu ken’t be dat old. Hyu iz from out of de town, iz in hyu voice. Und iffen hyu’d been here dot long, hyu’d get more of de Mechanicsburg accent, yez?”

Moloch shrugs and, in one go, downs the entire jug that Oggie passed him.

“Ugh, that’s foul,” he says, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “What _was _it?”

“Voz… um…” Oggie looks around for one of the few Jägers willing to admit to being a smart guy.

“Iz turpentine,” Jenka says. “Even most of hyu brudders vouldn’t drink dot. Iz, ah, _verra_ toxic.”

“Then why the hell’d you give it to me?” Moloch demanded.

“Ve saw hyu dreenk some last veek by accident!” Maxim says, swinging an arm around Moloch’s shoulders. “Ve vonted to see iffen hyu’d even notice eef hyu deed it again!”

“Hyu gots de goot stomach,” Jenka declares, nodding thoughtfully. “De bräu vos goot, dere.”

Moloch makes a face. “I… actually get the feeling that I was like this even before. Like… weird déjà vu?”

The other Jägers blink at him. They blink at each other.

“Hy vont to see hyu dreenk formaldehyde!” Henye shouts.

It’s a game, now.

\--

“Come here,” Mikhail says one day, with a very strange machine in his hands.

He delights in the way Moloch looks at him, dubious and a little dead inside. “Why?”

“Because I have found information that I think might help me figure something out,” Mikhail says, which is entirely true and in no way helpful to Moloch’s distrust.

“You’re _nuts_ if you think I’m—”

“Too late!” Mikhail says as he toggles a switch, cheerful to the last. It isn’t like he _actually _needed Moloch to come closer. It’s nice, though, to see how sensibly the Jäger in question resists anything he feels is unreasonable. So many more of the minions would survive if they were like Moloch.

Moloch flinches and bares his teeth, but doesn’t jump out of the way.[2] The ray from the machine reaches him and bounces back, and Mikhail eagerly reads the numbers. He’s much more _theoretical_ than most of his ancestors, preferring to find and record information than to build weapons and monsters. He _can,_ of course, and it’s certainly _fun_ sometimes, but he’s much more interested in tearing apart the rules of the universe at the seams and figuring out _why_ it works the way it does. It’s more efficient in the long run, too.

This is all to say that Mikhail, of all the Heterodynes before and after, was the most well-suited to analyzing Moloch and where he’d come from.

“HA!” He yells, as the numbers return. He does a little jig, even. “Great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Robur’s notes _were_ helpful! I can’t believe he tried to bury them.”

_“What_ were you right about?” Moloch demands, rather waspishly. Oh, he’s so _prickly._ Mikhail is tempted to pat him on the head and offer him—well, probably some unholy alcohol, really. It’s Moloch’s kind of thing.

“You’re from another time! The future, even!” Mikhail almost wants to plant a kiss on Moloch’s stubbly face, except he’s rather sure said stubble would scratch him up beyond recognition. “Wonderful!”

Moloch stares at him.

“I need a drink.”

\--

Moloch was not a _pacifist_ Jäger by any means, but he came much closer than most. Of all Jägers, Moloch was the one that Mikhail was the most willing to allow near his newborn. The claws were still a worry, of course, and Moloch’s tendency to drink anything anyone handed him, but he was also much less cheerily violent than the rest of the army, and was a fair bit less reticent to show off how smart he could be. He wasn’t a genius by any means, and certainly not a spark of any stripe, but he had the kind of intelligence and experience that meant he was competent at more things than not, and particularly at things that were _useful._ He didn’t know how to play the violin, how to summon the gods of time, or how to speak fluent mid-8th century Iranian, but he _did_ know how to prep a lab for work with volatile compounds, how to distill almost anything, and how to figure out the optimal fertilizer for any given combination of soil and plant.

“I think I grew up on a farm or something,” he says, while helping Mikhail figure out why his section of the greenhouse isn’t growing as quickly as he’d like. “And… I don’t know. I’m getting bits and pieces. I think I had a lot of brothers, before.”

“Before becoming a Jäger?” Mikhail asks.

“Yeah,” Moloch says. He notices something, a large, furred ear twitching, and then his hand snaps out and picks up a small body. “Kid, you gotta stop trying to smush the slugs.”

“But they’re so squishy!” Nergal yells.

“So are you,” Moloch says drily. “Think of it this way: if you were the size of a slug, and I squished you just because I thought it was fun, would you be happy?”

“Uh, no.”

“So is the slug going to be happy if you squish it?”

_“I’m_ gonna be happy if I squish it!”

Moloch rolls his eyes. “Okay, fine, what makes your happiness more important than the slug’s?”

“I’m gonna be the Heterodyne!”

“Yeah, why’s that important?” Moloch asks.

“Because the Heterodyne is the most important in Mechanicsburg!”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because, uh, we’re the sparkiest!”

“You’re not a spark yet.”

“But I’m _gonna_ be!”

Mikhail watches in the same fascination as always.

“What if the slug was a spark?” Moloch asked. “A slug spark. The sparkiest slug of all?”

“Then they wouldn’t be getting squished, because they’d build a death ray.”

“They’re very slow and don’t have hands. Try again.”

“Uh… I don’t know.”

“Cool. Would you squish me for fun?”

“Nuh-uh! I like you! You give me cookies when momma isn’t looking!”

Oh dear. Looks like Mikhail needs to speak with his wife.

Moloch crosses his arms. “Okay, am I a spark?”

“No, but you’re a Jäger, and—”

“No, no, this is about what you said earlier. You said that the Heterodyne is the sparkiest, and that’s why you’re important. By that logic, a non-spark like me shouldn’t be important, so you should squish me like you squish the slug.”

“But you’re not squishy!”

“And if I was?” Moloch asked. “What then? Is your happiness more important than my life?”

Nergal scrunches up his face. “I don’t like this question.”

“Every life is here for a reason, kid,” Moloch say. He ruffles Nergal’s hair. “Even the ones that are fun to squish and experiment on. Just think of how annoyed you’d be if someone put _you_ into one of the experiments you want to do.”

Nergal frowned at him. “But the Heterodyne gets to do whatever they want.”

“You’re only a Heterodyne by chance,” Moloch says. “You got lucky, punk. Use that luck, sure, but don’t make other people suffer just because they weren’t as lucky.”

“But I’m not lucky! I’m smart, and I’m gonna—”

“You _are_ lucky,” Moloch interrupts. “You’re going to work hard, we both know it, but you _already_ have a leg up on the competition because of your family. You don’t need to cut that leg off, but don’t lie to yourself and say you deserve things that you only got because you were born into the right family.”

Nergal looked up at him, lip wibbling.

Moloch shook his head and picked Nergal up. “Come on, let’s go get some cookies.”

“Actually, I still need you,” Mikhail said. “Nergal, go bother your mother.”

“…kay!”

Nergal runs off, and Mikhail turns to Moloch with a fascinated grin. “Are you trying to teach my son _morality?”_

“What, ya gonna kill me for it?” Moloch asks, with that dry, dead tone that implies he might not care so much if Mikhail did, or at least doesn’t believe his Master will actually go through with it.

“No, but it’s rather a contradiction, you know,” Mikhail says. He can feel his brain racing at the very thought of it. “A moral Heterodyne! There’s never been one before.”

“Not impossible,” Moloch says, and then pauses and frowns. “I…”

“So there’ll be one in the future?” Mikhail prompts.

“I… guess so?” Moloch says. He looks lost. “I think so. Maybe even a hero.”

“Oh, the Castle will _love_ that,” Mikhail laughs. “Go on, keep doing that. I want to see what happens and, really, what harm could it do?”

\--

The harm was at least three tables broken over the course of highly spirited philosophical “debates” with Jorgi. This happens at least once a year.

\--

The years sprint past quickly. Nergal isn’t a _good_ person, but he’s probably a fair sight better than the generations before him. The path is a wobbly one, to be sure, but Mechanicsburg doesn’t seem to mind, even if the Castle laments how often Moloch wins in their games of who can raise the Heterodyne more thoroughly. Sometimes a better Heterodyne is raised. Sometimes an evil one is. Moloch is never _banned_ from helping raise the children, though his role cycles from Chief Minion to any number of similarly annoying tasks.

It’s complicated, though, because Moloch has _help._

It’s a sad day when they lose Mikhail. Moloch’s not—he’s not in the worst place in his life. He’s sure he’s suffered worse grief. It’s not something he can take quite so easily, though. Not really.

They go to the crypts, a place that feels familiar though Moloch is sure he’s never been down there before. They pass a statue, and he feels the hairs on the back of his neck raise.

They pass it again on the way back, and he swivels and walks right up to her.

“I’m from the future. I don’t remember anything solidly, but I’m pretty damn sure you’re alive, and I think… you’re a friend? Maybe.” He pauses, takes a breath, and figures it’s not the worst way to go ahead. “You wanna get the hell out of here?”

Otilia’s eyes snap open, and she looks down at him.

Her hand closes around his neck, and it takes a good five minutes of fast talking to get her to _stop._

(He marries her fifteen years later. He’s not sure how or why or when it all happened, but it did. He can’t say he’s upset.)

\--

Teodora doesn’t hate Moloch. Of all the Jägers, he is her favorite, because the first time one of the boys tried to do something cruel, and Saturnus just _laughed,_ Moloch had stepped in before she could say a word and started coaching Bill through a basic lesson in compassion for living beings.

“Ugh, not this again,” Saturnus complained, then. The look on his face was one that spoke of this having happened many times in his own childhood. “Please stop trying to turn all the Heterodynes into heroes.”

Teodora wanted to snap at him, but she kept her cool and simply said, “I want that one.”

And Saturnus, bless his blackened heart, had been willing to give her almost anything she’d wanted, other than a chance to go home.

So she got Moloch as a personal assistant.

She likes having him around.

She _loves_ having him around, especially when that wife of his, an honest-to-goodness _Muse,_ comes to play the role of governess. When Teodora is tired, and Saturnus is trying, and the Castle is maddening, she can trust the Muse and the sulkiest Jäger to do her job for her, and raise her boys right.

“Are you out of your goddamn _mind?”_ Moloch yells, that day it all finally comes together. “God, really living up to your fucking namesake, aren’t you? Killing your fucking kids? What the hell kind of a decision is that?!”

“They aren’t fit to wear the name of Heterodyne, not with morals like—”

“Oh piss off, if Nergal was enough of a Heterodyne, if _Genevius _was enough of a Heterodyne, then your kids will be too.”

“Castle, remove him.”

Teodora watches it all happen through a crack in the door, and she is left when Moloch isn’t.

She does what Moloch couldn’t.

_They’re in good hands,_ she thinks, when the Castle kills her for her killing her husband.

\--

When the Heterodyne Boys disappear, when there is no Heterodyne to be found, there is a thread of hope.

_I’m from the future,_ Moloch reminds them. _And we still haven’t met me._

So they join the baron and set some Jägers to search, and they wait. There’s still no Moloch in the army save the one that showed up in a crater all those decades ago. There _will_ be a Heterodyne, because he is a Jäger and for a Jäger to exist, there must be a Heterodyne to create them.

They set their jaws and hoist their guns and act the role of good little soldiers, because Klaus isn’t a Heterodyne, but he _was_ a friend, and Bill would probably approve of them helping him bring peace in a way only they could.

They do that because it’s the only way to survive.

\--

“That’s me.”

“Hm?” Jorgi asks, looking up from the orange slice he’s been contemplating for eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Moloch’s staring across the hallway, at an oddly small man with the unshaved stubble and build of a career soldier, wholly human and drinking a bottle of what appears to be carnivorous fertilizer.

There’s a blonde next to him, young and angry and _soft._

“That’s _me,”_ Moloch hisses under his breath. “That guy in the—next to the girl with the long skirt, you see him?”

And it’s there, in the cut of the jaw and the hairline and the nose. It’s Jorgi’s best friend and arch rival and blue fire he’s _short._

“What do we do?” he asks instead, because Moloch is on the shortlist to become a general, and the more often Jorgi defers to him, the less likely Jorgi is to be the one promoted.

Moloch takes a breath and shudders. “The girl. Smell it?”

Jorgi sniffs, and it hits him.

Oh.

_Oh._

“We can go home,” he whispers.

“Not yet,” Moloch says. “But soon. Soon.”

[1] The Countess Jessamine was one of the many women that Satyricus Heterodyne had failed to woo. She’d been cruel and callous and, above all, completely uninterested in him. He’d found that frustrating, and then hilarious, and then tried to sell her his little brother as a present.  
She’d slammed the door in his face and told him to get the hell out of her garden.  
He’d decided this meant she was his destined bride, and died three months later while attempting to genetically engineer the perfect strawberry for her.  
In a twist of irony, Satyricus’s younger brother actually met the Countess shortly after and managed to court her with much more success. She’d still almost never smiled, but she’d certainly frowned just a _touch_ less severely than she had around Satyricus.

[2] The Castle might have taken this opportunity to attempt to convince Moloch he was slowly dying, but it is currently rather occupied with a heavily pregnant and incredibly irate Henrietta.


End file.
